Terrie Moffitt

Terrie E. Moffitt ( born in 1955 in Nuremberg, Germany) is a British psychologist who was born in Germany and criminologist. She is a professor at the University of London ( King's College London) and at Duke University (USA). In 2007 she was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

Moffitt has made ​​significant contributions to Entwicklungskriminologie. For this, they examined mainly the available results from an ongoing longitudinal study from New Zealand ( Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study). In this study, 1037 children born between 1972 and 1973 are explored from the New Zealand Dunedin District in two-year intervals.

Criminological main results were: the proportion of chronic offenders is numerically rather small. In this group begin offenses since the age of seven and take into adulthood continuously. Life -course persisters have loud Moffitt substantial deficits in social, moral, emotional and cognitive skills. This results in the course of life to growing problems ( dropping out of school, unemployment, early fatherhood, divorce, incarceration ) that reinforce the tendency to crime yet. The psychiatrist Moffitt performs such gradients on neuropsychological dysfunction from early childhood ( such as linguistic deficits, inattention, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, impulsivity ), but denies a biological determinism of crime. Only in interaction with an unfavorable social environment, the dysfunctions could train to be an anti- social syndrome.

Far more often are episodic youth offenders. Their criminogenic abnormalities begin only with the maturation age and end mostly with him. Moreover, the abnormalities do not affect the entire social field, but only sections, in particular the leisure sector.